抄録
Two experiments were carried out in order to investigate whether memory representation of a sentence is an integral unit or reducible into a set of simple elements. To-be-remembered sentences consisted of five content words to form three propositions. In Experiment 1, the number of anomalous propositions (0, 1, and 3) was varied. After acceptability rating of sentences, subjects received unexpected recognition memory test. They were instructed to rate each sentence and its component parts (3 propositions and 5 words for each sentence) on a 5-point scale. The results indicated that the recognition scores of sentences were higher than those of their constituent words when the sentences did not involve anomalous proposition. In Experiment 2, repeating the same words in the list resulted in higher recognition scores for the words and lower recognition scores for the sentences which involved the repeated words. These findings were interpreted as suggesting that memory representation of a sentence is an integral unit.
